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Why should the writer of some 50 celebrated books have suffered such a reversal? For one thing, although West refuses to acknowledge it, Wells was not in the same league as his colleagues James and Shaw. For another, science has far outrun imagination — even Wells'. As for his popular histories, they have long since been superseded by works that use evidence instead of fancy. But all this is irrelevant to the biographer. To him the alterations of time and taste are as nothing compared with the depredations of Rebecca West.
The former Cicily Fairfield nourished acting ambitions long before she became a writer, and her son argues that Rebecca never quite left the stage. The brilliant reporter of history (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Train of Powder) melodramatized every personal slight, and when she found that she could not have Wells to herself, she decided, West contends, "to pull down his literary reputation" with ad hominem attacks and accusations that he had turned publishers against her. In 1928, "Wells gave her a very short answer to these charges," says the author. "She was lying, and she knew it as well as he did. The correspondence was abruptly over."
But the conflict remains. Nearly four decades after the writer's death, H.G. Wells amply demonstrates that in domestic wars as in wider ones, truth is often the first casualty. For in the end, despite all of West's approbations, H.G. Wells seems a monument, not a man, and Rebecca West appears as an overdrawn termagant, rather than an authentic human being who must have suffered innumerable hurts of her own. The only entirely credible figure is Anthony West—when he appears as the damaged son. In the part of chronicler he is sadly though understandably miscast. In their times, his parents predicted and covered many events. But it is unlikely that they ever saw themselves in their present roles, as the main characters in a new permutation of Rashomon.